A lot of downvotes on reddit are actually inserted by the system, accompanied by the same number of upvotes to balance them out. This is supposed to be some sort of anti-spam anti-troll measure, though I'm not sure how that even works.
Anyway, the upshot is that you never know the true number of downvotes you got. This can be discouraging for people who don't know about computer-generated phantom votes.
Re:Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter
by willvarfar on Tuesday March 06, 2012 @05:27AM
(#3670411)
What bugs me more is that the numbers jump all over the place if you refresh the page. Even the number of comments seems out of sync.
That CAP gets so much in the way is irritating. Its like stackoverflow used to be a while ago.
You can make big sites that don't have such laggy BASE. I guess not with the reddit infrastructure perhaps.
The one thing i like about hacker news is your posts still have 1 point minimum even if others dont like it, whereas in reddit you fall down to 0 points which makes you feel discouraging sometimes.